Lorraine Peltz is talking about her painting Infinity, which shows seven lipsticks lined up against a pink background. “If you’re a serious artist you certainly aren’t making a pink painting,” Peltz says, explaining that she’s attempting to reclaim the color, freeing pink from its association with little girls’ bedrooms. “This pink has to do with the body. It sort of looks like skin. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Charm Bracelet, 12 different kitchen implements are arranged against a red background full of tomatoes, painted with a stencil Peltz cut from cardboard....

Since leaving its theater space on the near west side a year and a half ago, Doorika, the experimental theater company known for its often mysterious and visually arresting work, has performed at Lounge Ax, the Empty Bottle, and New York’s Knitting Factory and CBGB. Artistic director Erika Yeomans says the itinerant existence, constantly packing up their portable pig-nose amplifiers and appearing in simple spaces, has made the company feel like a rock group....

During the two decades or so that she lived on the streets, Chicago’s famous bag-lady artist Lee Godie could often be found drawing on the steps of the Cultural Center. Now her art is on view there in a massive 20-year retrospective that includes some seldom seen early work. Exhibit curator Michael Bonesteel (who first wrote about Godie in the Reader in 1982) writes in the catalog: “Breathtaking in their simple beauty, guileless in their natural expressiveness, [the] early pieces have few of the bizarre exaggerations of character reflected in her subsequent work....

Last spring two of Chicago’s best actors, Hollis Resnik and Kevin Gudahl, struck sparks as the romantic antagonists Celimene and Alceste in Charles Newell’s smart, sexy staging of Moliere’s The Misanthrope. This season the sparks have burst into a four-alarm fire in this 1992 comedy by Jacques Rampal. Positing a reunion of Moliere’s characters after 20 years–during which time she’s gotten married and he’s become a power in the Catholic church–Rampal’s verse play (directed by Newell in the world premiere of its English version) demands exceptional performers who can balance poetic formality, emotional immediacy, and psychological nuance....

By Harold Henderson Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Antiques are where you find them. The weekend of February 10 Eagle River, Wisconsin, will host an “Antique Snowmobile Derby,” featuring “re-enactment of the very first snowmobile derby, which was held at Dollar Lake”–all of 33 years ago. Oops! I forgot to be chemophobic there for a minute! A press release touting alleged “HIV and AIDS cures by holistic experts” recommends, among other things, replacing dental fillings that contain mercury and nickel with “pure plastic....

In 1956 George Balanchine invited Arthur Mitchell to join New York City Ballet, and Mitchell went on to international fame as a NYCB principal, noted as much for his charismatic personality as his virtuosic versatility. But he remained the only black dancer on NYCB’s roster. Occasionally other ballet companies would engage a black man, but black women were unheard of on ballet stages. The excuse most frequently offered by ballet management was that black women’s bodies were physically different in carriage and proportion and lacked the pure classic line....

When Deborah Hay choreographs a dance, she has trillions of collaborators: every living cell in her body. Years ago she set herself a unique disciplinary system of what she calls “cellular consciousness,” isolating herself all day, every day, in her studio, training herself to listen to her body’s messages on how to move. The resulting performances have been as charged as lightning. Though it was almost a decade ago that I last saw her perform, at Dance Theater Workshop in New York, it seems as if it were last week....

Largely unappreciated in his own country, the Italian count Giacinto Scelsi (1905-’88) wrote at his own pace and followed his own taste without succumbing to the pressures of a peer group. Mostly self-taught–though he went through the musical training required of a young nobleman–he often sponsored concerts to showcase his own music and that of like-minded friends, but was dismissed as a dilettante by Rome’s tight-knit musical bureaucracy; there were even rumors that he hired others to transcribe and orchestrate his compositions....

I have been trying for the past several weeks to get a good look at a yellow-billed cuckoo, so far without success. I have heard its call many times, but always from thickets so dense I couldn’t locate the bird. As a group the cuckoos are reproductively innovative. The three species of the genus Crotophagus, commonly known as anis, are group nesters. They hang together in flocks of as many as 20 birds, and when the urge strikes they build a communal nest....

Pay attention to John McLean: at the present time Chicago boasts no guitarist more consistently intriguing or satisfying. The evidence lies in a few recorded outings–locally produced albums by Patricia Barber and Jeff Stitely–and in his devastating onstage performances with a variety of Chicago bands. McLean brings an impressive intensity and focus to his playing; you can hear it in the fluid forcefulness of his attack and the precision of his trickiest constructions (and you can see it in the contorted distraction of his facial expressions)....

LOUD FAMILY/LONG FIN KILLIE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Few songwriters of the last decade possess such an innate tunefulness as the Loud Family’s Scott Miller–and fewer still have abused it so. In his previous band, Game Theory, and his current combo, Miller has run the savvy, irresistible pop of Big Star-era Alex Chilton through the wringer. Not content to fire a seemingly endless barrage of ultracatchy melodies at the listener, Miller obfuscates them with weird tempo shifts, complex song structures, obtuse lyrics, and wiggy instrumental flourishes....

Anew group of independent filmmakers calling themselves X-Film Chicago initiates “Barbarians at the Gate,” a biweekly series of experimental film screenings, with this nine-film program of unusually high quality. In New Moon Donna Cameron combines cutouts from newspapers with simple line drawings and TV images. Avoiding postmodernism’s familiar ironic approach, the film presents close-ups of newspaper fragments as solid, almost sculptural entities. The next moment we’re off and running, dots and shapes flickering by in wildly irregular rhythms....

The last time Toni Moore faced so much racial animosity was in college–a mostly white school in Appleton, Wisconsin. “We’d walk down the street and people would turn and stare like they had never seen black people before,” says Moore. “Some would yell ‘Nigger.’ But in some ways what I’m going through now is worse, because I never expected it.” But Moore isn’t the first black employee to charge Amnesty with discrimination, and her case has won the support of dozens of local activists....

SALEM. THIS LAND IS. Their first show, Salem. This Land Is., now playing at the Chicago Actors Ensemble, is a rich performance piece, combining transcripts from the Salem witch trials with dance generated by the ensemble and choreographer Peter Carpenter and original material by director Lee Anne Schmitt. The idea is to explore the modern equivalent of the hysteria in Salem in 1692, which led to the hanging of between 19 and 23 people (the counts vary) as witches and the jailing of over 100 others....

The exciting thing about Haile Gerima’s lush, wide-screen folkloric feature about black slavery–independently made and distributed–is its poetic conviction, backed up by a great deal of filmmaking savvy. Born in Ethiopia but based in the U.S., Gerima attended UCLA’s film school around the same time as Charles Burnett, Larry Clark, Julie Dash, and Billy Woodbury. I haven’t seen his previous films–which include Harvest 3000 Years, Bush Mama, and Ashes and Embers–but Sankofa (1993) shows that he has a camera style and political vision all his own....

Mixed Quartet November 8 and 13; repeating November 15 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » James Kelly started his Choreography Project in 1991 as a conscious blend of styles; the Dance Chicago ’96 program describes the company as “based in jazz, ballet and contemporary dance.” His Strings/4/Glass/Dance starts with the music, a Philip Glass string composition. Kelly shows great musical intelligence, and his dancers perform beautifully....

REACTION FORMATION 5/28, SMART BAR, 5/29, phyllis’ These local pop-flopsters are calling it quits with these shows after a decade of public indifference–proof that it’s never too late to learn. JUNKHOUSE 5/28, AVALON Considered one of Canada’s hottest bands, which is sort of like being considered Wyoming’s next big thing, Junkhouse traipse through rock’s vast history, turning up everything from hard rock to roots to boogie and cramming it together into one unkempt jumble....

ROLF LISLEVAND What? How can our most prestigious musical oddball award go to a person more than 300 years old? Of course this question just points out a historical prejudice: supposing that the only artistic nuts crazy enough to know about are contemporary. But think back a century earlier than Kapsberger to visual artists like Matthias Grunewald or Hieronymus (maybe there’s something in the name) Bosch. Bosch’s work included images of upside-down masturbating men with cracked orbs coming out of their anuses, depicted next to a guy putting the make on a giant owl....

A prime example of what film scholar Eric Rentschler calls the Third Reich’s attempt “to aestheticize politics in order to anesthetize the populace,” Rolf Hansen’s The Great Love is patriotic exhortation disguised as star-studded extravaganza. Zarah Leander, a Swedish chanteuse anointed queen of Nazi cinema by Goebbels after Marlene Dietrich declined the honor, plays a music-hall diva who falls in love with a fighter pilot on leave from the front (Viktor Staal)....

A while ago I saw a tagline on alt.fan.cecil-adams from someone who was darn proud to be a member of the National Rifle Association. I asked if the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution still holds water today since the intent was to provide guns and protection against the other side of the puddle. This sparked a huge debate on the Net about the right to bear arms with, as usual, both sides claiming they are right....